Blog

I’ll go ahead and say this right upfront: Email makes my life better, richer, and more efficient. It made my dream
of being a widely read writer a reality when I first started publishing weekly
journals back in 1998. But as with all good things, email can also become a
disaster in the wrong hands.

My story begins Monday last week
when I checked email on my phone. Something was amiss. All I saw was a long
string of messages saying, “Mail Delivery Failed.” I had fifty seemingly
identical messages. All day Monday, every time I checked it downloaded a new
set of fifty emails. Message after message, saying, “Mail Delivery Failed.”

It’s true, I’d sent out a group
email the night before, and I often get one or two messages like that because I
type the address wrong or someone changes addresses or whatever, but this was
something else. For one thing, I’ve never sent a group email large enough to
get this many returns. And another thing: when I looked closely at some of the
returns they had addresses I had never heard of. I was under attack.

I also knew it was different from
those email viruses going around that send junk to everyone on your contact
list. None of these returns were from anyone I ever knew. I was getting returns
in Japanese and German and Thai and Arabic. Not my contact list.

When I got home, I went to my laptop,
tagged the returns as junk mail, and deleted the rest of them in my inbox. Then
I went riding, to burn off some of the frustration.

From that point forward, Outlook did
a great job grabbing the incoming returns and stuffing them into junk. By the
time I went to bed Monday night, I had 7,340 messages in my junk folder. It
seemed like a lot. I deleted them all hoping my problems were over.

They weren’t.

For the next couple of days I got
page after page after page of the same “Mail Delivery Failed” messages. They
were all unique, with different bounced email addresses. Outlook sent them all
to my junk folder, but my server cache, wherever that is, filled up so that
friends could no longer send legitimate emails to me since my inbox was too
full.

By Friday morning, the return
message rate had decreased to the point I was once again receiving legitimate
messages from friends. Even my own predictable junk mail from catalogues and
political candidates found a way through. I had stopped deleting the emails in
my junk folder because I wanted to know how many I would receive. Why fight
through an adventure if you can’t quantify the damage, is what I always say.

So here is my diagnosis: Some
scammer, who knows who, who knows where, found my email address and password
and used it to send his spam so that it appeared to originate with me. When the
messages were rejected, either by a canny server or because the address was
stale, they bounced back to me.

My friend and computer go-to guy,
Frank, said it would probably be over in a few days after the spammer moved on
to someone else’s fresh address.

In the meantime, I had been tagged
as a spammer. I was receiving worldwide rejection from people (or, computers) I
would never meet. I only hoped Homeland Security didn’t get one and put me on
their comprehensive
suspicious-character-don’t-let-him-do-anything-especially-fly-on-an-airline
list. I also hoped al-Qaeda didn’t get one, or SPECTRE. Blofeld holds long
grudges.

Well, it’s now over. I didn’t have
to change my email address because of this attack, which made me happy because
I like my address. There are only three people using Stonefoot since we created
it ourselves using the name from one of the giants in The Last Battle from The
Chronicles of Narnia. I would hate to give that up without a fight. Other than
temporarily cluttering my hard drive there was no damage done.

By Friday evening, all I was
receiving was typical standard junk. No new “Mail Delivery Failed” messages.
The final count in my Outlook junk folder was 44,266 emails. Seems like a lot.
It was a reminder there are many things that make my life better that I cannot
control.

Sometimes life throws so much junk
at you, you might as well stop fighting it. Just wait until it tapers off,
delete the records, and start fresh.

QUESTION: What junk are you dealing
with this week? What is filling your inbox?

“I run in the path of Your
commands, for You have set my heart free.” Psalm 119:32